The hidden music in Plato’s dialogues

Tarbet forwarded a couple of links to me about a scholar who has found hidden musical qualities in the structure of some of Plato’s dialogues. This YouTube is a short interview with the scholar, where he sketches out the basic idea:

And this link is to one of his papers in which he shows more concretely what he’s talking about, in connection to the Symposium:

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1 thought on “The hidden music in Plato’s dialogues”

Yeah, yeah – it sounds like Dan Brown’s “Da Plato Code.” But every single line in Plato does seem to hide onion-like layers of secretive irony. The essence of Socrates is irony, and the years of Pythagorean geometry and wine-drunk poetry symposiums complement that in an interestingly musical way. Puns abound. Every dialogue is a weirdly geometrical masterpiece – after all, that’s the point, isn’t it! – so maybe there’s something to it.

But for those in Kant and the 19th C., this is pretty interesting in relation to Schopenhauer. I’m convinced our favorite shock-haired, imp-eyed pessimist does find a place for Plato’s Forms between Kant and the Hindu Vedas. But the whole thing relies on music. He admits in “The World as Will and Representation” that it the project may as well be called “The World as Music and Representation.”

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PHILOSOPHY BOWLING RESULTS

(Explanation: some years ago we went bowling, divided into teams, and used the results to answer timeless philosophical questions. The results are as follows.)
• Is the world eternal? YES
• Do humans have contra-causal free will (i.e., can humans do otherwise)? NO
• Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? YES
• Do humans have souls? YES
• Are there natural rights? YES
• Is it morally permissible to eat meat? NO
• Is the unexamined life worth living? NO
• Is truth subjectivity? YES
• Is virtue necessary for happiness? YES
• Can a computer have a mind? YES
• Can humans know reality as it is in itself? YES
• Is hell other people? YES
• Can art be created accidentally? NO
• Can we change the past? NO
• Are numbers real? NO
• Is it always better to know the truth? YES